CloudWatch Pricing Calculator - Logs, Metrics, Alarms & Observability

CloudWatch Logs has two access classes: Standard at $0.50/GB and Infrequent Access at $0.25/GB for less frequently queried logs. Archival storage costs $0.03/GB compressed (approximately 15% of original size). Logs Insights queries cost $0.005/GB scanned. Vended logs from AWS services use volume-based tiered pricing starting at $0.50/GB.

Custom metrics use tiered pricing: first 10,000 metrics at $0.30/metric/month, next 240,000 at $0.10, next 750,000 at $0.05, and over 1 million at $0.02. The first 10 custom metrics are always free. API requests (GetMetricData, PutMetricData, etc.) cost $0.01 per 1,000 requests. Metric Streams cost $0.003 per 1,000 metric updates.

Standard resolution alarms (1-minute or longer periods) cost $0.10 per alarm metric per month. High resolution alarms (10-30 second periods) cost $0.30 per alarm metric. Composite alarms that combine multiple alarms cost $0.50 per alarm. The first 10 alarms (standard or high-resolution) are free. Dashboards cost $3.00 per dashboard per month, with the first 3 free.

CloudWatch offers a generous free tier: 10 custom metrics, 3 dashboards, 10 alarms, 5 GB of logs data ingested, 5 GB of Logs Insights queries, 100 Synthetics canary runs, 100,000 X-Ray traces recorded, and 1 million X-Ray traces retrieved/scanned per month. Most of these are always free (not limited to the first 12 months).

X-Ray charges $5.00 per million traces recorded, $0.50 per million traces retrieved, and $0.50 per million traces scanned. X-Ray Insights stored costs $1.00 per million. Free tier includes 100,000 traces recorded and 1 million traces retrieved/scanned per month. You can control costs by adjusting the sampling rate in your applications.

Container Insights for EKS with enhanced observability uses tiered pricing: first 1 billion observations at $0.21/million, next 3 billion at $0.18/million, over 4 billion at $0.10/million. Container Insights for ECS costs $0.07 per metric per month, prorated by the hour. Without enhanced observability, Container Insights uses standard CloudWatch metrics pricing.

Synthetics canary runs cost $0.0012 per run. A canary that runs every 5 minutes (8,640 runs/month) would cost approximately $10.37/month. The first 100 canary runs are free each month. Additional costs may include Lambda execution time and CloudWatch Logs storage for canary logs.